NSF $12 million middleware initiative will aid scientific discovery and educationWashington 24 September 2001 A group of university-led organisations and research centres across the United States will work together on a $12 million project to develop middleware, software which allows scientists and educators to share applications, scientific instruments and data, and collaborate with their colleagues across the Internet.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the programme called the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). NMI will create and deploy advanced network services that will make it easier for Internet users to access a wide range of resources available through high-performance networks. For example, they will be able to share scientific tools, such as telescopes or modelling software, access supercomputing systems and databases, and run simulations in real time with colleagues across the country and around the world.
The effort will build on the successes of the Globus project and the MACE initiative in developing middleware tools, and will integrate emerging middleware components into a well-tested, comprehensive, commercial-quality, middleware distribution package that runs on multiple platforms. These middleware distributions will be disseminated to research labs and universities
worldwide.
Two groups will receive the awards. A team formed by Internet2 will include EDUCAUSE and the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA). A second team that includes the University of Southern California School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the University of Chicago, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will establish the GRIDS (Grids Research Integration Deployment and Support) Center.
NCSA's Randy Butler compared the NMI and its expected impact to the original NSFnet, the high-performance network that first connected the NSF supercomputer centres in the 1980s. "NSFnet allowed researchers around the country to begin to build and strengthen collaborations because they could easily share information", stated Mr. Butler. "NMI will allow researchers to go beyond simple information sharing and enable true virtual teaming."
The GRIDS Center will have two main functions: developing and integrating an NMI architecture and packaging, testing, and supporting NMI software distributions. The Internet2 team will develop an NMI architecture that focuses on inter-realm directories, security, and naming and will integrate these services into a variety of key applications, including desktop video. The team will also promote widespread, consistent, and rapid deployment of these technologies to the higher education and research communities.
The GRIDS Center will be led by Randy Butler of NCSA, Ian Foster of UC, and Carl Kesselman of ISI. Foster and Kesselman will be co-directors of the center, and Mr. Butler will direct operations. The central activity of GRIDS will be to develop a new set of middleware building on successes of the Globus project that has developed tools for Grid computing, and to integrate these with other emerging middleware components.
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